I didn't find out about this soon enough, otherwise I would have better prepared for it. Anyway... Lord of the Rings Online is having a stress test weekend. I'm scrambling to download the beta. It looks like it's going to take at least another three hours. I probably won't get to play tonight. Has anyone tried this game?

http://www.lotro.com/stresstest

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Michael Garofalo
Webmaster - http://photics.com

I played it for a few hours over the weekend.
In many many ways, its just like WoW, quest chains, crafting, resource gathering, the keymap, etc. I would do a quest chain about 5 quests long (mostly fedex quests), and get a reward I couldn't use, other than to sell.

And just like WoW, many of the quests are annoying in that you have to follow vague directions to find where you're supposed to go, and what you're supposed to do. Then you have to remember where the person was that gave you the quest to get the reward. It makes you really appreciate the quest pointers in GW. This vagueness also (as usual) led to a bunch of chat spam with people asking where things were repeatedly.

Due to the fact that they only had 3 servers up, and everyone was running new characters all doing the exact same quests, spawn camping was rampant, with lots of whining in the chat window about kill stealing.

The main issue I had with it was that you really need a machine with 2GB of memory to play it, my laptop with 1G of memory was swapping noticably while playing. (Note: Oblivion plays just fine on this machine)

After a clean reboot, my machine was using about 280M of memory, while playing LotRO, the commit charge would go up to around 1.3G of memory.

The client also appears to be basically single threaded, so my dual processor setup wasn't used effectively.

LotRO uses basically the same engine as D&D Online, so its got some age to it, and overall it was 'stable', the bugs that I saw had more to do with the quest and mission triggers.

One of the more humorous ones was when you paid to take a horse between two of the towns and ended up jumping off a cliff and dying.

The only thing I didn't try was the PvMP stuff, as I had no idea how to do it. Supposedly in one of the areas you can play as a 'monster' and go hunt other players.